


Everybody Knows

by Syrenslure



Category: CSI: NY
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-12
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-08 08:11:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1130326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syrenslure/pseuds/Syrenslure
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>//you've been discreet, but there were so many people you just had to meet - without your clothes //</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everybody Knows

Story Notes:

Prompt: **varietypack100** 030\. death, and for **stellaluna_** who participated in this meme.  
Notes: This is a much delayed answer to this challenge, but sometimes you have to wait for the inspiration to come to you. This wasn't an easy prompt, but I finally found my muse and a character that I hadn't much considered before.

Chapter 1 by Syrenslure

His skin itches with a too tight feeling that has nothing to do with the filth of this place that he has never wanted to be and can't wait to leave. It has everything to do with the thought of the bars closing in on him inside of his cell and the thick plexiglass between him and Mac, as he begged him to believe, even as he resented his need to do so.

Even now, as Sheldon walks down this grey cement tunnel, toward freedom, toward Stella - who is standing there almost like a vision - he fears that it's all a dream or some hallucination born of claustrophobia. He wants to reach out and reassure himself that she is really there - his own personal goddess to lead him from the underworld.

He wants to touch, and feel, and lose himself in thesoftness of her skin and the scent of her passion-soaked body wrapped around his. The irony is that however free he may be, and however real she may be, standing there waiting for him, he knows that if he reaches for her now, she will be just as elusive as his freedom had seemed to be forty-eight hours ago.

She hasn't let him touch her in weeks. She even flinches from casual contact lately, even though she knows, he knows that there is no danger in that. She is steadily building a fort around herself, more inpenetrable than these concrete walls, and it is as if she thinks the smallest touch, the most casual intimacies, if they slip past her defenses before they are fully hardened may cause flaws in the foundation of her defenses. She won't allow that.

He knows the risks better that anyone, and for Stella, Sheldon would take them. He hasn't felt such a need to reconnect to the world since his first six months in the morgue. It had seemed like he was trying to sleep his way through all five buroughs, and half of Jersey, too, trying to forget the twisted bodies that were his new patients. They were all too young and too beautiful to end up as they had - whatever their fates.

Six months later, he had finally found his own peace, after testifying in his first major homicide case and realizing that he could and did make a difference in these lives, that he could still help to heal people, even if they weren't the ones under his knife. He had lost that sense of desperation and has actively fought it ever since. He even transferred to CSI when the morgue started to get to be too much for him. His bi-yearly HIV tests, and the rememberence of how hollow he had felt trying to lose himself in an endless parade of willing partners seeking their own oblivion, keep him from wanting to reexplore that empty escape.

He doesn't want a random stranger. He wants Stella. It would almost be worth the remainder of his sanity (and hers) to sweep her away to his loft and bury himslef in her body until the sun rose and fell without meaning, and he could feel alive through each little death after death.

He's a practical man. You can't rejoin the world by running away, and he isn't a coward. He doesn't take the easy way out, and he has worked damn hard for the things that he has wanted in this life. He wants to rail at them all for being taken away from him so easily, but he won't give up his dignity to do so. Not even for her.

_Thats how it goes_  
_Everybody knows_  


  
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

This story archived at <http://panthermoon.com/dreaming/viewstory.php?sid=29>  



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